


Wishing

by DictionaryWrites



Series: The Serpent's Gaze: A Slytherin!Harry AU [12]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Crying, Grief/Mourning, Hurt/Comfort
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-06
Updated: 2017-11-06
Packaged: 2019-01-30 03:18:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,416
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12645078
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DictionaryWrites/pseuds/DictionaryWrites
Summary: Draco is locked in his room: from the other side of the door, Harry tries to offer some comfort. Set duringThe Lernaean Hydra.





	Wishing

**Author's Note:**

> Written for a meme on my Slytherin!Harry blog. [Link to the original post.](http://snakepotter.tumblr.com/post/167178304785/do-you-promise)

Draco is locked in his room again.

His bedroom door at Grimmauld Place is locked tightly, and although Harry knocks and knocks on the mahogany wood, it does not open, and Draco doesn’t so much as tell him to go away, but it is worse than  _not_  knowing - knowing that Draco is in his bedroom, crying? That’s worse than most things. It’s almost as bad as the grave they’d all stood over not two months back, the grave marked  **LUCIUS MALFOY**.

“I’m not going to go until you let me in,” Harry calls through the door. “Not this time, Draco.” He presses his ear tight to the wood, desperate to hear something inside: there is nothing. Hogwarts let out its students a week and a half ago, and every day Harry has come to Grimmauld Place to try to speak to the other boy: every time, Draco has been locked in his room. He won’t respond to Harry’s letters, either, and Harry cannot  _stand_  it. “Draco.  _Draco_.”

He sighs, pressing his forehead to the wood, and he slides slowly onto the floor, his body pressed against the dark wood. “The first time your father wrote me, I told him I thought you were a pillock. Did he ever tell you that?” Inside the room, it is still silent, but the silence seems different,  _feels_  different - unless Harry’s just deluding himself. “I wrote and said we were sharing a room, and that you’d been an absolute  _arse_  on the train, and that I hoped we’d be good friends. And you know what he wrote me back?”

Harry sits with with his head pressed against the door, his hands splayed on it. Is Draco listening to him? He doesn’t know. “He said he  _knew_  we’d be friends, because anybody bold enough to tell his father you were an arse would be well-equipped to handle you.” Inside Draco’s bedroom, Harry thinks he hears a sob, or a laugh.

Relief burns in his chest, and he swallows hard on the lump in his throat. “We talked about lots of stuff. He told me what conditioner to buy to actually get my hair to stick down, and he recommended that comb for stubborn hair, We talked about duty a lot, and about what it means to be a parent, and a prefect - he told me about being prefect when he was at Hogwarts, and about how he was Head Boy. Did you know that about him, that he was Head Boy? I didn’t until he mentioned it. He used to tell me about his birds, and how they were doing, and what was blooming in the garden at Malfoy Manor.”

Everything feels so clear in his mind: because hadn’t he, the day after the funeral, spent hours in his room with every letter Lucius Malfoy had ever sent him spread out before him, rereading every line, every word, every postscript?

“And he wrote about you, Draco,” Harry murmurs through the door. “He’d ask how you were doing, or just mention how proud he was of you, and he’d say that the house was quiet without you, or that the dogs are missing a soft touch, or that people had been asking after you at parties. He wrote me once about seeing you on your first broom, how excited you were, and how you’d flown straight into that pond by heather bushes. And Lucius, he said he panicked, because in that moment he had this sudden terror that you were allergic to heather, and he jumped in to pull you out as if he wasn’t a wizard at all - and of course you’ve never been allergic to heather, it was  _rhododendrons_.” That’s definitely a laugh now, but it becomes sobbing.

Harry feels his eyes sting.

“He loved you, Draco, I– I don’t know how much I can  _tell_  you he loved you, because I was just a kid he wrote letters to out of politeness and a sense of duty, and he radiated love for you on every page.  _Every_  page, Draco.” Harry presses his forehead against the door, feels the coolness of the mahogany against his heated skin, and he feels absolutely powerless. “He wouldn’t want you to lock yourself away from everybody, and stay in your room. He wanted you to have the world, Draco. Not just the stuff inside your bedroom.”

The door opens.

Harry is left on his knees, looking up at Draco. Draco, who is tall and pale and thin, and whose red cheeks are streaked with tears, his lips bitten to bruising, his slender hands shaking. A long silence spans between them.

“I never thought he’d die,” Draco whispers. “I never– Never.”

“I didn’t either,” Harry says, slowly getting to his feet, and he doesn’t wait for Draco to initiate it, because he knows the other boy never will: he closes the gap between them and hugs the other boy as tightly as he can. He thinks of Lucius performing his after-threat ritual on Draco: holding him by the cheeks and checking in his eyes and mouth and ears, looking for any  _visible_  sign of damage before hugging Draco to his chest. Draco’s nails dig into Harry’s shoulders as he tries to grab tighter at him, but Harry doesn’t pull away even when it starts to sting. “You had him fifteen years, Draco,” he whispers. “I know it’s awful right now, the loss, but  _fifteen years_  of love. Isn’t that a lot?”

The sound Draco releases cuts Harry down the middle, so awful a noise it is. It’s a heartwrenching, guttural sob, and for a selfish moment Harry is desperately glad he can’t see Draco’s face.

“Let’s go sit down,” he whispers. “Let’s go sit down, we can talk about him.”

“I don’t think I can.”

“I can,” Harry murmurs. “I can talk about him. Does that help?”

“Yes,” Draco breathes. “Yes.” Draco is shaking like a leaf in a strong wind, and Harry kicks the door shut behind him as he sits at Draco’s writing desk, and as Draco seats himself upon the bed, wrapped up in more blankets than Harry can count.

They talk and they talk until Harry’s voice is hoarse, and until Draco’s head is still upon his pillow.

                                                                      —

In the kitchen of Grimmauld Place, Harry holds a cup of coffee between his hands. When Narcissa enters, Harry looks up at her, aware that his own eyes are red from crying, and that his voice is hoarse, and it hurts to speak.

He speaks anyway.

                              “I won’t leave him alone.  
       I’ll be here  _every day_ , Mrs Malfoy.   
                   Whatever it helps to get him through this, get  _you_  through this   
                                                            - if there’s anything I can do…”

But what can Harry do? Lucius Malfoy is dead. Lord Voldemort killed him, and Harry can do nothing about that at all. Except to kill Voldemort, of course. Kill him for what he’s done, for what he wants to do, for  _everything_ …

                                                    “I won’t abandon him, Mrs Malfoy.”

Draco has eyes like Lucius’, icy-blue and cold, but when Harry looks at Narcissa’s face, he can see all the parts of her that Draco has in his own face: the shape of her lips and the soft roundness of her chin, the same cheekbones, the same curve to their pale eyebrows. They look alike, mother and son, as much as people act as if Draco has always been a carbon copy of Lucius.

Not for the first time, Harry regrets not writing Narcissa herself. He wishes he  _knew_  her like he’d known Lucius Malfoy - he’d signed their letters often, of course, with “Lucius and Narcissa” or “Your friends, the Malfoys,” or something, but it’s not the  _same_  as having a letter penned by the person themselves. His letters had been from Lucius, in Lucius’ handwriting, from Lucius’ pen.

                           “ **Do you promise?”**

Harry stares at her, his lips slightly parted. The question, so full of impact, of concern for her son, of  _focus_ , shocks him for a moment. Why should he promise? Could she really think he didn’t _mean_  it? When Draco is fitfully asleep in his bed with his eyes cried out, and his pillow stained with tears, that he might be  _lying?_

Harry speaks softly when he says,

                                                                           “On my life, Ma’am.   
                                                             I promise on my  _life_.”

He watches her,  _stares_  at her, and wishes he could know what she was thinking. And most of all, for the fiftieth time that day, he wishes Lucius wasn’t dead.


End file.
